The New Color of Heroine Addiction

Heroin has made a large comeback in the past decade with usage increasing among all demographic groups. While the story of rising drug usage sounds familiar, what has drastically changed in recent years is the rhetoric surrounding the issue and the policies taken by the government to combat it. The heroin epidemic is treated more and more commonly not as a “war” against drugs but as a public health crisis. In the new conflict against heroin, compassion and forgiveness have replaced the scorn and derision once heaped upon so-called “junkies.” While this is a positive development as far as effectively treating the epidemic goes, there is an interesting correlation between race and the tone of the discussion on heroin. It can hardly be seen as a coincidence that the softening of rhetoric has directly correlated with the rate of heroin usage among whites.

90% of the people who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade where white and usage rates in suburban white communities have been sky rocketing as prescription opioid abuse leads more and more people into addiction to cheaper and stronger heroin. Deaths from heroin also quadrupled to 8,260 from 2000 to 2013. This means that heroin is having a historically high impact in white middle class communities.

This correlation seems to indicate that although heroin use and deaths from it have been a problem for a long time, it was only once the heroin epidemic spread to white communities that substantive action on the issue was taken. When the negative impact of the epidemic was limited to black and Hispanic communities we had the war on drugs, harsh mandatory sentences for drug offenders, and punishment favored over rehabilitation for drug addicts. Now these policies are being replaced with an emphasis on forgiveness and care, seemingly directed at the new category of white middle class users. While the war on drugs was once used to reinforce racial stratification by imprisoning and oppressing racial minorities for their drug use, the involvement of large numbers of whites now seems to have changed the dynamic of drug policy.

          This view is somewhat cynical however, and perhaps the changes in policy are due to a more innocuous change in the public understanding of the drug epidemic rather than a conscious attempt to benefit whites. While much of the war on drugs was based on racist depictions of drug offenders as evil blacks and Hispanics, many drug offenders are now understood to be addicts who are victims of circumstance in many cases. In many ways this change shows how the sociological imagination can change our understanding of an issue. By understanding the circumstances that push people into addiction our society can better treat and prevent it. What is unfortunate is that it took a large-scale impact on whites for this understanding to come about. If the same level of empathy that many police departments and public officials are now showing towards white users could have been extended to minority users in years past, then perhaps a large number of deaths as well as destruction of communities could have been prevented.

More information and the source of my statistics can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/us/heroin-war-on-drugs-parents.html?_r=0